Columbia, S.C., residents begin to pick up the pieces

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Resilient Columbia residents returned to their homes and businesses Monday to pick up what was left after historic floods swept through Saturday and Sunday.

Cheryl Stevenson had waded through waist-high water in the dark early Sunday morning to escape her quickly flooding duplex on the bank of a creek in the Forest Acres community.

Monday, she opened the front door to find her furniture rearranged like jigsaw puzzle pieces. She stepped through the front door onto soggy, muddy carpet and looked at the 4-foot-high water line. Pictures ruined. Furniture destroyed. Everything caked in mud.

"Don't ever underestimate the power of the good Lord," she said. "Don't ever underestimate the power of water. It's nothing to play with."

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Across the river, shards of broken garden pots and empty wooden structures were all that was left of what was Forest Acres Garden Center two days ago.

The pots were strewn throughout giant mud puddles. Tables that once held plants had disappeared. The plants were gone too, carried away by the flood.

Joseph McDougall had started his business 12 years ago on $100. He sold watermelons and tomatoes outside his brother's nearby business, then worked and built and worked some more, turning it into a local favorite.

Now, he'd lost it all.

But when asked, McDougall smiled. He said he wasn't devastated. He wasn't even sad. He looked forward to the chance to build everything from scratch again.

"I started this place with $100, so I cannot look at anything as a loss," McDougall said. "Everything is a gain for me."

McDougall said he planned to "have a ball" cleaning it up.

"If you look at it now compared to when I'm done with it, it's kind of exciting."

Next door, Lee Burton didn't know if he would rebuild. He owned a South Carolina bookstore inside of Webb Rawls Gallery. Monday, he came back to survey the damage. The shelves were uprooted and laid on their sides.

He'd lost every single book. And without costly flood insurance, he was left with nothing. He surveyed the damage and didn't know where to start.

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"I had some very rare South Carolina books in there. They're gone. The flood just rearranged everything," Burton said. "Pretty much everything in the store is a total loss. Just going to have to take it out, put it in a dumpster and have it hauled off."

As residents returned to their homes, they drove along roads that had entire chunks missing. Cars had floated and settled into the middle of some streets. Bridges along neighborhood streets had disappeared. Some discovered that trees had crashed through their roofs, and they worked to lay blue tarps to stop leaks as the rain continued to fall Monday.

Sirens still blared throughout the day from law enforcement vehicles — some of which carried swift-water rescue boats in tow — and helicopters whirled overhead.

Even as residents began to pick up the pieces, the threat resumed.

Residents of the Forest Acres community near Lake Katherine in Columbia were loaded onto South Carolina National Guard trucks and evacuated Monday afternoon as a dam breached at Lake Katherine.

At 3:25 p.m. ET, the Columbia Fire Association said the Overcreek Dam broke and urged residents to move to higher ground.

Police officers drove through neighborhoods with a bullhorn telling residents to move to high ground because floodwaters would rise rapidly.

John Moses and his wife live about 300 yards from the lake and heard a police officer knocking on their door.

"Police were knocking on our door and telling us it was a mandatory evacuation and the National Guard brought some trucks in, told us to get onto the trucks," Moses said. "We all piled on there, didn't have time to really react or grab anything. We all just left."

Residents were taken to A.C. Flora High School where they described the scene at Lake Katherine.

Law enforcement had already deployed rescue boats to help evacuate people caught in the potential flood, Moses said.

They told him this was the last Guard troop and he had to leave immediately, he said.

Bettie Hart and her husband grabbed what they could and loaded onto a truck with 19 people, four dogs and the Harts' two cats, Star and Gracie, but Gracie jumped from the truck as it left.

"(Police officers) had been by several times during the day and one of the police officers, that was his second trip, and he said, 'I want you out now.' So we had things packed by the door and we grabbed them, and here we are," Hart said.

Emergency crews closed the bridge over Forest Drive and told onlookers to leave for a mandatory evacuation. Law enforcement vehicles sped toward Lake Katherine with sirens blaring.

The Harts and others at the shelter didn't know how their homes would fare.

"Just pray for South Carolina. We just covet your prayers," Hart said. "We are a resilient people and we will pull together. We have neighbors who have lost everything."